22 October 2010updated 12 Oct 2023 10:16am

Falling in and out of love with the Institute for Fiscal Studies

Shock! Horror! Nick Clegg and George Osborne have changed their tunes since entering government.

Here’s our Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, castigating the Institute for Fiscal Studies in a Guardian interview with Patrick Wintour and Nick Watt:

I think you have to call a spade a spade. We just fundamentally disagree with the IFS. It goes back to a culture of how you measure fairness that took root under Gordon Brown’s time, where fairness was seen through one prism and one prism only, which was the tax and benefits system. It is complete nonsense to apply that measure, which is a slightly desiccated Treasury measure. People do not live only on the basis of the benefits they receive. They also depend on public services, such as childcare and social care. All of those things have been airbrushed out of the picture by the IFS.

Clegg has form when it comes to attacking the think tank’s regular critiques of the coalition’s “progressive” credentials. But in opposition, the Lib Dem leader was a big fan of the economic pointy-heads at the IFS. Here he is, during the election campaign, speaking in the third leaders’ debate on 29 April:

I was really delighted at the Institute of Fiscal Studies when they compared the three parties’ manifestos this week and said very, very clearly – and very directly – that our proposal to lift the income-tax threshold to £10,000 is the best incentive to work.

So he’s “delighted” when the IFS praises his party but “fundamentally disagrees” when it criticises his coalition. Convenient, eh? And this is the man who once championed the “new politics” . . . Oh dear . . .

The Chancellor, George Osborne, also rejected the IFS analysis of his “regressive” Spending Review yesterday in a round of early-morning interviews, in which he said:

I think if you look at all the measures, you can see that everyone in society has got to make a contribution but the richest do make the biggest contribution, not just in cash terms but as a proportion of their income.

Again, in opposition, Boy George sang a different tune. He praised the IFS as a “much-respected independent insitute” and told MPs in the Commons on 22 March 2007:

As often happens, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has looked into the figures and it has confirmed that it is a very substantially tax-raising Budget. Will the minister now confirm that the IFS is right?

But the best line of all from Osborne came in the opening remark of an interview he did about Labour’s last Budget on 26 March: